04 Mid-Poly Body

In this course you will learn to create a photo-real game prop using modern game art production techniques. You will gather reference, generate a base model, create a high polygon model, bake details onto a low poly model, and then texture and present a final portfolio piece. This course is aimed at students who have some knowledge in 3d and game art and would like to learn more advanced techniques employed in the creation of modern game assets. We will be using Maya, Zbrush, Marmoset, and Substance Painter extensively throughout the course. When you are finished you will have your own model based of of a real-world prop suitable for use in modern game engines.

In this module you will work to create the form of your model. This mid-poly block-in will not be textured, nor smoothed into a high resolution model. The goal is to create a mesh that is accurate to your reference that can become the starting point for your high and low poly models. This is often the most challenging part of the process.

강사:

Andrew Dennis

스크립트

In this video, we're going to continue the block end process. This time focusing on the main body of our binoculars. So in this video, I'm going to start modelling out the body of this main binocular piece. There's a lot of complicated shapes in here and some areas that actually gave me a lot of trouble when I was first modelling it. What you're seeing is me going through and modelling something. I've already modeled twice before to solve some problems. In fact, my first time solving some of these areas especially this little corner here where this little dial in some of the control component parts are, that took me a couple hours to resolve out exactly how I wanted to do that and what I thought would be the easiest way to show you in this video. So oftentimes when you're watching someone online and they are speed modelling, it's not the first time they've done it. It might even be the third, fourth or even fifth time that they've gone through that process. Often, I'll get halfway through modeling something only to discover I didn't really understand the shape of something and only after I model it and I look at it to the reference and I say that's just not right. Do I really understand? So when I did initial block in, I was very concerned with some of these top shapes. For instance, I made this little indent in and I kept this one relatively square. I thought about this shape here. But when I'm looking through and I'm modeling and I look at the bottom, suddenly it looks like I have a square shape and both of these taper in together back here. This is because if we look at for instance these front views, the bottom sort of has this pole in, this little taper in but then on the top there's this extra piece out here and without things like Booleans this would be really, really tricky to model. But even with Booleans, the order we do these processes in is really the trick. In fact, when I was doing this video and putting it together I made a little list for myself about the exact order I did things in. Because although I can do different cutouts and Booleans for all these, the sequence in which I do them makes a lot of difference in terms of the final result that I'm actually going to get. I spent this process up to about 200%. So I can still narrate what I'm doing and you can get a good idea of how I did a refinement to this blackout. So I simply made a line down the middle with my edge select tool and I did a bevel here to smooth out the edges. I like to do this a lot. I'm going to be doing the same thing down the middle just making some adjustments. So I do another little edge through everything and then I use the scale tool to line them up in the middle. I want to make sure it's right in the middle so that if I move this, this becomes the basis of my curvature and all I have to do now is use the Bevel tool to sort of give it a rounded curved everything. I'm trying to use all of my orthographic views to get a general guide of where things should be. You know, I have my reference image off to the side and I'm looking at that a lot throughout this entire process. So looking at the top here, I want to make sure that everything lines up with my objective lens and capacity to scale this up a little bit more. But at this stage, I'm just moving around a lot. Moving around my model, rotating as many ways as I can and looking at my reference images as much as possible to get a sense of what is working and what's not. So now I'm creating a cylinder. I'm adding some round caps to it. This is going to be the basis for the rounded corner and everything. I actually did several versions of this exact process and to get exactly shape I was looking for, this one is the one that worked the best. I know that overall there should be a cylindrical shape back here that lines up with the dial and reaches all the way across the back of my object here. So I'm going to turn this rounded shape into something of a block. So I take these bottom faces and I extrude them down. Move it into position and sort of line up with everything and I'm changing my pivot to make it easier for me to line everything up with my block in. Then just pulling everything to the back. Again lining everything up. I'll be using a Boolean operation to attach these two together. So I'm more concerned about where everything intersects with each other when I'm going to Boolean it than I do about the exact geometry of the shape that I'm adding right now. So now I'm taking the phases on the side and just like the ones I extracted on the bottom, I want to extend these out to the side as well. Here I'm choosing the faces on the side and I'm going to scale them. Sometimes you need to reset the scale tool especially like me you're changing the pivots pretty frequently it can screw things up a little bit. But I just basically want a nice, flat shape on the sides. So I'm going to get rid of some of these faces and then just reconnect those and bridge them together manually. I don't like to do a whole fill hole around that corner, it won't work really well. So I do a couple of bridges and then I do a fill hole. So as you can see it looks like things here line up pretty well. Again, here this is a place where I'm looking a lot at my reference image. It's very clear that this little round piece kind of intersects with the overall form of the binoculars. So I'm making small adjustments to the sides of this to get the place where there's two shapes intersect to create the right lines for me. This is this place where the more reference you can have, the better to help you understand what the shape should be, where things line up or key features hit each other on this. So now I'm trying to connect a couple edges at the top. It's going to help control this Boolean a little bit. I just want to pull this front out because it gives me the little piece and a cap. I know I'm going to have to cut this away anyway eventually. But I need a little bit of geometry with it to start off. So here I'm beveling everything on the back. I'm doing this sort of gives me at least a couple extra edges. After I'm done with the whole process of Boolean them in, I want to be able to have enough geometry to connect up the vertex in interesting and meaningful ways. Then on the other side, I'll give it that little bevel so that it doesn't jump out from beyond the intersection. So now I just do a simple Boolean operation, attach these two objects together and I have to do a lot of clean up like I would with any Boolean. I like to use the target weld tool for this. It's pretty quick. I always thinking about which edge I'm preferring, which one I'm going to. I try to get things to line up in straight lines as much as possible. In this case, I don't need that face anymore. I don't need that edge. I'm adding a couple of multi cuts in here to help our form draw through. Just going around the model, looking how I can clean things up. So with this transition, I want to prefer everything that I see in my cutting Boolean piece, and get rid of some of the extra garbage that was on the body of my binoculars. I'm using vert snapping to line in the y and z-axis with the object right behind it. Then connecting everything back up together. Sometimes to clean up areas like this, I'll have to get rid of entire faces or whole sections of something. It's easier than it is just trying to merge everything back in, because then I know what I'm dealing with. I like to think as I'm going through and doing this process, the scale of what I'm going to be seeing. I don't want too many tiny little verts all crammed together in one area, it's going to make it much harder for me to control later. It's not going to give me the result I'm exactly looking for. Often we get really zoomed in on a feature and it looks really big to us. But in the scale of the model, it's actually very tiny and you can hide a lot of the technically small errors in there. So paying attention to the bottom of my little Boolean tool here, looking for which edges I can reasonably join up without changing the shape of my object too much. So that's looking pretty good here. Making a couple adjustments to some of my extra edges, I like things to be straight and lined up. It's not super essential. It's just easier for me to organize and it will make the unwrapping process all easier too. So now, I'm going to create a new cylinder, and this is going to become the basis for my dial. I want to line it up, pretty much exactly with the cutting tool that I made here. I made a little duplicate of the dial in case I want to come back to it later, or I need it as a cutting object. So this one I'm going to cut away, and that means I still have one that's the same size and same scale. Just like with any Boolean, I'm going to use my target well tool, and just clean some things up. It's important to get in close here and sometimes it doesn't look like you have double vertex, but you really do. So here I'm just deleting all of these open faces, and I'm going to fill hole and just turn it into one big end gun. Then if I do a poke face, it gives me pretty much the same thing. I see here I had one extra edge to the side, and I'm going to collapse this because I want to keep the edge distribution pretty even across this whole form if possible. So I want the edge distribution on this cylinder, on this little cap to be as even as I can get it. Especially, when it comes to any rounded corners or edges like this, I want to make sure everything is distributed evenly as possible. So there I used the transform surface slide to let me move that vert just along its existing surface so that I don't have to worry about affecting the form even as I try to get my geometry to line up better. Now, I'm preparing the region that's going to represent the little scoop out of the top of this, whatever object this little jetting out point. Especially with the block in like this, my goal is to create a basis for both the low and high poly geometry. By far, this is the most time consuming process in my modeling workflow. But the idea is that by putting extra time in here, we have a lot less work to do in the low and the high poly. Those two steps go much quicker because we spent a lot more time building this mid poly model in preparation for the other two. So here I'm making some adjustments from our front orthographic view, to the curvature that we make. I think a lot about planar and curves surface where it starts being flat, and where that form transitions to being curved. That's a really important part of understanding what's happening here. So I want my curve to start a little further out. So I just multi cut and vert snap it out to the front of the form, and then that helps me change where that flat piece, that planar piece starts. So making a cap through here, a little cut to represent where the cap part of our two-piece body comes in. Then I'm going to line all these little objects up with each other using the scale tool, and make sure I snap them back into place so it lines up with that Boolean cut that I made. So more target welding, just more general clean up on this model. Zooming in pretty close in any regions where I think I might have missed something. So now, I want to put a soft curve on the top front of this camp. It's a really important feature, and it's a little difficult to sometimes do bevels on top of bevels like this. It's a little easier to do more at the same time because I need different widths, I need to do that in different orders. Then it's just a matter of coming through with my move tool and manually taking this part of the bevel and making it wider. I went back and forth on exactly how to do this. It's a little tricky in a region like this when I really need a single bevel to reach around the object, but it needs two different widths. So just filling up any last holes I have here, and my block in looks pretty set, just making sure objects line up as they should. I'm checking my reference, and it looks like my model looks pretty good. In the next video, I'll be taking you through the process of turning this. In the next video, we'll be working on block in in the last couple of small features throughout the model, before we're ready for our high poly modeling.